A few weeks ago at labmeeting, the suggestion was made that we could share journal table of contents-reading responsibilities.
This has several aims:
- increasing general knowledge of important questions, techniques & discoveries in our greater field
- reading more
- opening horizons: reading more broadly - including outside of your comfort zone!
- efficiently helping each other out
- decreasing the likelihood of missing relevant "key paper"
I have set up a way this may work: For each time-period (probably 1 month), 2 people will be responsible for each journal. The choice of journals is random. You will have different journals each time-period. A hack for random journal assignments is here:
https://github.com/wurmlab/crowdCheckingTableOfContents
And the results from a first run of this (Rscript randomize.R) are here:
https://github.com/wurmlab/crowdCheckingTableOfContents/blob/master/2016-05-03-TableOfContentsDuties.md
(scroll down to see the easier version; random means that some people have 3 journals, some have 4)
Your role will be to highlight the most relevant articles from your journal into a shared document. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A_OY3OuByRuHBYy4vh8L0SopdCqvd4O9ogqm0vP-I1g/edit?usp=sharing (I'll send an editing invite)
Perhaps there is nothing relevant. That's cool. In many cases no explanation is required: just put title and hyperlink (and authors); in other cases writing one line justifying why the paper matters (or to whom) will be helpful. You can do this independently, or with the other person who is also responsible for a given journal.
This first batch should include anything published between April 10th and May 10th (in print and early access). Finish it by May 15th.
I suggest that everyone has the ability to exchange ONE journal with someone else. For this, talk to someone, agree with them, then push a change to the repo. I am happy for any of my journals to be exchanged for any other - no need to ask me - just let me know once you've done it. Please put changes on the 2016-MM-DD-TableOfContentsDuties.md file in bold.
The journals I have selected are not meant to be exhaustive. Indeed, very relevant stuff also gets published in many other places, e.g on rxiv, peerj, plosone, at conference proceedings, in other journals (heredity, insect mol biol, gigascience, BES, blogs, hackernews...) et cetera. They are not included in the core default list because these alternate sources have higher relevance of quality or relevance to our stuff. However, if a paper/tool has appeared that you feel would be relevant, please also add it to the shared document (last category "other").